Last week I experienced the one thing that every writer hates more than rejection: theft by a customer. A customer’s account on an agency site had expired without buying my article. That’s not unusual. I recycled the piece, following approved procedures, and submitted it with a few changes to another customer through the same agency. It immediately bounced back to me as plagiarized!!

This made no sense to me, and I immediately got suspicious. I did a Web search on the first sentence of the article. There was a match — on the site of the customer that had lapsed without buying my article! They had published it without bothering to pay.

In this case, the story had a more or less happy ending. The agency made good on the article, paying me for it even though they must have absorbed the loss. I say “more or less happy” only because a truly happy ending would have given the customer a bath in boiling oil.

If you do enough writing, you’ll get hit this way sooner or later. It’s worst when you not only get robbed but are the one who’s accused of plagiarism. In my case the agency had the submitted article in their files, so they knew the customer had seen it but never bought it. If you resubmit an article through a different channel, you might not be so lucky. That’s an argument for running your work through a plagiarism checker before resubmitting it. I haven’t done that in the past but really should make it a habit.

What to do?

Unless you’re a big-name writer who can plausibly claim huge damages, there’s no effective legal recourse. Suing for a hundred dollars will be buried many times over in legal expenses. A letter from a lawyer may get results, but even for that you’d better be hoping for at least a few hundred in payment. The thief may just take down the article when caught, which doesn’t put any money in your pocket.

It’s more effective to watch out for such customers and avoid them. The clues for spotting them are basically the clues for identifying problem customers in general. There’s an article on freelancerfaqs.com on spotting bad clients. The ones who aren’t likely to pay are often the same ones who are painful to deal with, so avoiding them is a double win. Some of the characteristics of these clients are:

• Shifting and unreasonable demands
• Ridiculously low pay rates, like 1 cent a word or less
• Requests for plagiarism of others (if they want you to be dishonest, that’s a good clue about their ethics)
• Rejection with gratuitous insults and false claims

Sometimes it’s better to back away from a bad client and absorb the loss than to work with someone you can’t trust. Call it a learning experience.